The last of xAI’s co-founders left the company — only Musk remains of the 11

The last of xAI's eleven co-founders has left Elon Musk's company, according to TechCrunch citing sources close to the startup. The team that launched the new AI laboratory together with Musk just over two years ago has completely dispersed. xAI was founded in July 2023 as a direct response to ChatGPT and OpenAI's dominance — the company whose board of directors Musk left back in 2018.

Among the eleven co-founders were researchers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and other leading AI laboratories: Igor Babushkin, Greg Young, Kyle Kosich, Christian Szegedy, Manuel Croiss, Jimmy Ba, Yuhuai Wu, and others. Musk positioned xAI as a laboratory for creating truly understanding artificial intelligence — in contrast to what he called the politically motivated approach of competitors. The first departures began already in 2024.

Igor Babushkin — one of the key technical co-founders who came from Google DeepMind — left the company just a few months after its launch. Others followed. According to TechCrunch, by the beginning of the current week, only two of the eleven co-founders remained at the company.

Now the last one has also left. The name of the departing founder is not officially disclosed. Notably, xAI has demonstrated rapid technological progress amid this personnel turbulence.

In 2024, Grok 1.5 and Grok 2 were released; in early 2025, Grok 3 emerged, which surpassed competitors in a number of benchmarks. The company launched the Colossus supercomputer cluster in Memphis — 200,000 GPUs in the first phase with plans to double.

The latest funding round of $6 billion valued xAI at approximately $50 billion. In parallel, xAI completed its merger with Twitter/X, which significantly changed the internal structure of both organizations. The complete dissolution of a founding team is not uncommon for ambitious AI startups led by a strong leader.

At OpenAI, a similar process took several years: Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Greg Brockman — key names who left the company in 2023–2024. Anthropic essentially grew out of a mass exodus from OpenAI in 2021. xAI is repeating this pattern in an accelerated mode: two years — and the founding team has been completely replaced.

The reasons are typically predictable: disagreement on strategy, competition for influence over decisions, pace of work. Musk has repeatedly stated that xAI must work faster than any competitor. Few can sustain such a pace for years — especially when the CEO simultaneously manages Tesla, SpaceX, X, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and DOGE.

For the industry, the departure of the last co-founder is a signal: xAI has finally transformed from a collective project into one man's personal AI company. This simplifies decision-making but simultaneously increases the concentration of risk on a person with one of the busiest schedules on the planet.